All this information that corporations want from us, and all these online systems they’ve installed that have cost so many millions of jobs…..what value are they adding to our lives? The Slog investigates.

I’m sure that, like me, you’ve pitched up at a petrol station, and stood there, pump in hand, idly looking at the enormous range of variously braindead, sanctimonious and mendacious notices that are everywhere. ‘Turn your engine off before filling the tank’, ‘no smoking’, ‘don’t use your mobile phone’ and so forth. For me, the worst of the lot is ‘for your protection, surveillance cameras are in use here’.

Oh right, it’s for my protection. OK. To protect me from what, exactly – an assault by feral hedgehogs? The fumes from people putting petrol into the exhaust pipe? The blast from people soaking mobiles in petrol before stubbing out cigarettes on them?

I get less than diddly-squat from the oilco’s security policy, period. It’s there to stop kids running off without paying, or to prove to the insurance company that other people caused the fire, or whatever other events might damage shareholder confidence in their business. Even if the peeping toms record me being bludgeoned to death by a tall deliquent, (a) the camera quality and/or hoodwear will make identification of the villain impossible and (b) I will be dead, so you need to tell me why I give so much as half a monkey’s scrotum about the guy’s apprehension.

The ability of corporations to spin further inconvenience for us into a philanthropic process or idea from them is infinite. “We’ve introduced these reusable bags that cost money to replace the old bags that were free (and the folks that used to pack them for you) because we care deeply about the environment and recycling and dangers to the ecosphere and choking marine life and little defenceless kittens, starving people in Indian call centres and any other bullshit we can dredge up in defence of this action”.

Will you forever va t’en fou: you did it because the Government is tired of paying to clear up your litter, and the 20p you charge covers the cost of obeying the dumbassed government that has no money in the first place because it suffers from fiscal butterfingers.

So ripple-dissolve and fast forward to recent experiences that only confirm the near-universal nature of this feeble pretence. And unsurprisingly, we are in an airport. I have a suitcase, a very heavy suitcase. But now there is this marvel of modern technology: the ability to check in first at the machine, and then at the check-in desk. What a boon this is.

But the lady at the check-in desk says my case is too heavy, and I must pay 70 euros excess, and we say no, we will redistribute the weight. But that means we must uncheck-in the case, put lots of shoes in my companion’s case, and go back to the desk but not go to the machine, because that will issue us with another seat and then we’ll have three seats between two, and thus the Universe will implode. but we do need a new baggage tag, although I can’t understand why the blue bloody blazes that might be. But the only thing issuing baggage tags is the machine that must be avoided at all costs.

This is Bordeaux Airport. It’s a big fuck-off international airport, so amazingly some travellers are going to have cases that must go in the hold. But auto check-in only “works” (it’s the best verb I could come up with) if you just have hand baggage, or if you have weighed the case before getting to the desk…where the weighing machine is.

There is a weighing machine elsewhere in the Hall, but it’s incognito. No signs or arrows point down at it to say “Weighing machine”, because incognito means incognito. It is working undercover: it is a secret weighing machine that likes its passengers both shaken and stirred.

Now let’s step back a few paces from this nonsense and get real: the machine is there – and every fifth customer inconvenienced – so that Air France can fire some staff because check-in ladies will have less to do, and thus they can process more passengers in less time.

The machine doesn’t benefit the customer at all: you can’t arrive later unless you check in online and have only cabin luggage. It doesn’t make the queues shorter or the process quicker….it simply enables the airline to employ fewer people and give more money to the shareholders.

I’m in Paris again; but back home we had a lightning storm, and when the Orange fixed-line internet box came on again it did almost everything it normally does – flashing red and yellow lights from ninety-six portholes – up to but not quite connecting to the internet.

So being utterly unreasonable, I want to get Orange to fix it before I get back. The last time I went fifteen punishing rounds with these arseholes, they told me it would be better if I created an espace client online, so I did. I’m telling you – you just won’t believe the amazing advantages delivered by having an espace client with Orange.

For a start, you can’t access your customer number there. Even better, there’s a hotline you can ring, at the end of which is a deaf robot that makes you answer yes and no four hundred times before saying she doesn’t know what you want and so goodbye until next time and have a nice day, sucker. When you persevere online, and tell them you’d like to get Orange to depannage this miracle of Korean technology, after scrolling through thirteen pages it tells you the customer that your qualifications for that service are lacking.

You know, my life is so much richer now, I don’t know what I did before I had an Orange espace client. I probably completely wasted my time on pointless shit like breathing, writing, having great sex and trying to invest money in a way that might stop me becoming the victim of being bailed in like all those lucky people in Cyprus. But now I stay amused by getting nowhere with a crew of monopolistic gangsters laughing all the way to the Bourse.

While I was doing this, the new person in my life was elsewhere in the apartment trying to get her smartphone fixed because it wasn’t living up to its prefix. It still isn’t fixed. But yesterday afternoon, her internet provider spent two hours with us on the phone trying to fix a problem with getting my laptop to recognise her internet system. We spoke to a real person, and when it was clear he couldn’t do any more to help, the bloke was so distressed I really thought he was going to go off and disembowel himself. Later, a friend came round with her son and fixed it.

The moral of this story is more glaringly obvious than a fifty-foot blue dayglo flashing neon sign at the entrance to a minefield. It is that employed people helping customers is better for long-term profit and social services than remote, mechanised and generally lobotomous contact with customers.

We are all of us the victims – knowingly or otherwise – of a mad idea, beneath which are smaller (but equally mad) practices that represent the consequences of that idea. The crazy idea is that of making a rich 3% richer by cutting overheads to increase profit margins. The consequences range from poverty, falling productivity and welfare dependence to starving pensioners and blazing tower blocks.

John
I fire off from memory …………….most early stuff audio ….no visuals!
….get it down quick before it has gone, hence the phonetics.
The ref was Ludwig Koch. Pioneer on recording bird song.
I only drink 2.2% beer for many years now , & not much of that !
You cause me big problems. you know the bad stuff …….. one thought had gone!

The sad fact is that we live in an electronic computerised world where ultimately all will have to have a rfid chip in order to perform any kind of transaction. The next looming lunacy will be variable pricing at the local supermarket. Prices will be cheapest at midnight but sadly as trade is insufficient at this time of day(night) we will be shut. As more and more robotisation occurs the need to communicate problems will escalate.
At this point the sheer frustration generated by trying to communicate with a electronic idiot will drive most to la la land.
We are all watching this happening but doing nothing to prevent it.

ohn,
Oh! For the days when The BBC blasted : Lude Vick Kok’s amd his willy warbler sound recordings from ‘ackknee marshes….. at us on a Sunday morning ,,,most missleading for a young lad, Followed by Jimmy Shand and his band…fffs! ,,, still in mild shock.
doffornow
——————–
I am left wondering if perhaps you’ve been in collision with a vat of Fundador Brandy….JW

Customer service? What strange notions you have John, I’ll let you know if I ever come across any. The problem with customer service is that if it’s any good people use it and it becomes a victim of it’s own success not to mention very expensive.

On to more important matters and everyone knows, I’m sure, that I’m not one to gossip but a new lady friend? I say let’s set up a sweepstake and my fiver is on Lizzie Cornish! Or have you run away with Theresa May because she just can’t take it any more and she’s now disguiesed as a garlic seller?

Mr Ward, it is too late the system is such a corrupt P2P in your face shambles it has no one good component or strut to build any way out. That is the whole economy we and the rest of the world have. All people wherever you live in this god forsaken world the position you hold is by their design because those at the top need to hold you in that position to maintain the economic form for them.

Ah, Mr W, you have this quaint notion that because you are an adult with 46 chromosomes that you MATTER, you have relevance, you have worth.

I am afraid that to the self-serving cabals who frame laws for us lot but excuse themselves from needing to adhere to them themselves, you do not matter, you exist to make them richer. You exist to do their bidding, be their servant.

The story of the internet is instructive. Like many, I used email in the 1990s and the internet once browsers like netscape came along. I used search engines which ranked pages on utility and relevance, not donations to corporate profit. Until about 2008, it was a revolutionary tool. Each year since then, searches yield less and less value, more and more mindless Press garbage about the topic queried and increasingly, I turned to out of print books, often 50+ years old, which contained more wisdom than the landfill sites of informational garbage found online. All this internet devaluation happened to enrich the few at the expense of educating the many. I no longer search with Google….

Human service is an ideal, not a reality. When you find it, value it. It goes out of business otherwise.

Disloyal rate tarts destroyed the mutuals along with carpetbaggers. Oh for member-owned building societies with common sense managers who know that having kids means a bigger house and transiently less income whilst sprogs are conceived, delivered and weaned.

Bookshops with staff who actually read widely, can advise well are gone. Now you get false reviewers online spouting bollocks to touch the author for favours. Sharing your knowledge honestly is a double edged sword: charlatans bleed you dry then tell the world how useless you are. Usually they have alcohol issues which are ignored as heavy drinking is a badge of Establishment malleability.

DIY stores selling functional tools which work are an anachronism. Their replacements are filled with substandard rubbish which falls to bits after two years. Polystyrene moulds for sowing seedlings are gone, replaced with plastic rubbish which warps within two years. Progress it is not. so I buy flowers I do not need just to acquire polystyrene moulds. Hosepipes of yesteryear which were simple, effective and durable are replaced by expensive rubbish that lasts five minutes. A watering can is not progress, but it does the job, albeit slowly. Of course, when I produced a spreadsheet on my PC with 100 functional products for the garden, parasites hack it.

You can say the same about kitchen stuff. There are more rubbish saucepans, useless implements on sale out there than I can describe. Gone is the knowledge of what is important, in has come a throwaway culture of endlessly replacing rubbish with rubbish.

Same about shoes and clothes. £100 for running shoes designed to split within 500km. Shoes which last 12 months if you are lucky.

Everything effective, timeless and of value discarded for short term cash.

Until customers seek out quality, pay for it and ignore rubbish at 70%+ of the price, rubbish will win out……

Technologically speaking, the price of ‘information’ is indoctrination; it didn’t have to be that way but vanity, greed, and hubris are in the ascendant and the effects are visibly dehumanising. With technology, man, I use the term loosely, has created a maze to confound himself with and is, as a consequence and by no means unpredictably, in grave danger of getting his hampton caught. In order to escape from a maze, should you wish to do so, it is generally accepted that you must be prepared to sometimes turn back before you can move productively forward. We must hope that the future will afford us such a luxury.. or we’ll be history.

You are so right
So called “customer service ” is now companies outsourcing their tasks to the consumers who are the paying customers.
Instead of brochures they ask you to look it up online!
They’re not customer friendly they’re customer hostile!
Airports tend never to have weighing scales anywhere handy…
Are we just all becoming angry old/young men/women?

I have Orange as an internet provider. I don’t have a Liivebox, i supply my own choice of router/modem. Had a problem last week, cretin on the phone couldn’t get past “no, it-s not a Livebox” (so, for example the IP address isn,’t what you think it is). Fixed it myself in the end.

we need to go for the directors who seek to profit themselves from this destructiveness..

Its madness to treat us like machines and endeavour to debase the human to human experience.. the problem is their gigantic greed which deprives them of the ability to appreciate anything at all that is truly human.

‘Oh right, it’s for my protection’
You know full well what the story is here but, you, like the rest of us have no chance of righting these wrongs as we stand.
We are facing an establishment that deals with the secondary problem, not the primary issue.
The pot is boiling. Pretty soon like it or not, the lid’s coming off. It ain’t gonna be pretty when it does.